In a strange plot twist the red pilled dudes have gotten so bizarre that when I get pulled into a debate with one of them I now spend most of that time defending men. At this point the only way they can make their world view work is if they decide that indeed men are violent monsters and that is appropriate and necessary. ...and so I just wind up spending all my time explaining that men are actually wonderful, unique, honorable, caring people.

You know what I plan to do in 2026? I’d like to not spend time discussing NGU. Instead I'd like to spend lots of time discussing the utility of Bitcoin. I’d like to have many conversations discussing Bitcoin in it’s cypherpunk freedom tech context. Please join me.

Did Christianity get co-opted? I often feel unseasy around Christians or those wearing crosses as my experience with Christianity is that it is a doctrine based on hierarchy, submission, and punishment. It is fueled by comparison, hate, shame, and fear. But then I know Christians who swear to me that their experience is all about love. ...how can that be? Well I recently learned about Gnostic Christianity. This was one of the earlier forms of Christianity and it was much more focused on inner experience and knowledge rather than institutions and punishment. But then, somewhere around 300 ce it shifted. ...it got co-opted. And that makes perfect sense. We can see now that’s how politicians and “leaders” of all varieties function today. They take something that is very popular among “the people” and twist it and turn it to fit their needs. Perhaps the tyrants of the day co-opted what Christianity was, and made it conform to their hierarchy, submission, and punishment based structures?

You can love people more when you trust yourself to be able to walk away. People get so scared of “falling in love” or having intense feelings, romantic or not, for anyone. And I get that, you can get your heart stomped on. But being really into someone, romantically or platonically, is really good for you! It makes your day better when you think about them, it fills you with happy hormones, it just makes life more worth living. When you get a bit old, and after you’ve already had your heart stomped on a few times, you can get pretty good at knowing when and how to walk away. And once you trust yourself to be able to walk away, then you can really dive into appreciating someone. Go on and be obsessed. If they become an asshole you can say goodbye. And there is no need to feel bad about it. You gave love because you are a loving person, and they were the ones that lost that.

Sometimes I want to be stupid rich, but not so that I can go to the Met Gala or feel superior to others, but just so I can do ridiculous shit ... like buy myself and 4 friends last min tickets to China so we can try some cafe I saw on TikTok.

I find strict atheists to be just as illogical as the very religious. If you’ve got any honesty, you gotta admit that we just have no #$#@$ idea. Just think about it, we can barely even get ourselves off this rock floating around in the middle of nowhere, we can’t cure cancer, we can’t even stop murdering each-other… and we have the insane idea that we understand the universe? Madness! We have no idea. And sometimes that is even more terrifying than thinking we vanish into nothingness. But it’s the truth. All we got are shots in the dark.

I've probably got a whole journal entry about it.

Don’t try to spice things up. If you’ve been with someone a long time and the “spark” is gone, don’t try to “spice things up”. It will just lead to everyone feeling pressure and frustration. The “spark” leaves when you’ve grown apart, or become room mates, or when the both of you have just stopped trying. And deciding to do some sexual role play scene with your room mate that you’re just not that into really isn’t going to go well for anyone! Instead, reconnect. Read a book together. Go out for long walks. Go on a trip together. Get drunk together. When you can actually see that person again, when you remember why you were so into them… that’s where the “spark” lives.

The Bitcoin vibe on Twitter is so sad. All this forcing others to take pills or bend knees 🤢 I’m a big hippie y’all, I’m not here to “dominate” others. I’m just trying to build some cool shit that makes life a bit better… for everyone 🫶🧡✌️

Once again I'm convinced that the red pill mania and characters like Fuentes are being propped up and pushed by foreign actors, probably Russia. This is not a natural organic movement. This is the result of intentional media manipulation.

When you finally get into the fancy room you realize that all these “accomplished” people are the most desperate followers that you’ve ever met. Meritocracy, its the idea that people should be in the fancy room, or not, based on their talent and effort. And in theory, I’m a huge fan of meritocracy. But in the states especially, this concept has turned into a twisted sort of status game. There is this desperation to prove one’s value by being “above” others… by getting into the room that others can’t. I was born into that culture and at times embraced it. I desperately wanted to get into that room. I was convinced that only the best of people could be there. The smartest, the hardest working, the most insightful, and that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to go to the fancy restaurants, the exclusive clubs, the biggest cities, the most expensive hotel, the VIP lounge. And then it happened. I got my name on the list, I sat at the table at the fancy dinner, I met my heroes. And it broke my heart. At first of course it was quite exciting and fun. But it didn’t take long to start to notice the cracks in the facade. All these people weren’t the most hard working, the most intelligent, the most insightful… they were the most desperate. They were not there because “the cream rises to the top” they were there because they were also desperate to prove themselves. That fancy room, it’s just a room full of people all desperate to prove that they too can be in the fancy room. Sad, and pretty sobering when you realize that description includes you. Now inclusion in the fancy room is of course very much a meritocracy, but the “merit” being tested is one’s ability to follow. It’s a test of one’s ability to pick up on what the current culture values and emulate that effectively. It’s a test of your trendiness and ability to curry favor with others. It’s one of those things where once you see it you can’t unsee it. Now when I look at the pictures from the party in the fancy room I feel a bit embarrassed for those attendees. They don’t even realize what a confession that photo they proudly posted is. The world is really a lot messier than it’s comfortable to acknowledge. There isn’t a room full of all of the smartest, the hardest working, the most insightful. The people that you will wind up having genuine respect for are scattered all around in all sorts of rooms. You are very luck when you occasionally meet those people. You might meet them in a fancy room, but you are just as likely to meet them on the bus. It’s a big letdown to realize that “the fancy room” is just a fantasy. You can’t have it, because it doesn’t exist. So I’ll just be drinking with my friends at the dive bar.

You don’t understand therapy. It’s not a pity party, it’s adulting. Two years ago it was difficult for me to just be in a car, and driving one was a gut wrenching experience. I was struggling just to drive two blocks away to the shops via side streets and parking lots. But this morning I woke up early, made a cup of tea and decided to head out for a nice relaxing drive. I got in the car and drove to the shops 30mins away on roads going 45 mph. And it was relaxing. How did I pull off that transition? Therapy. And this is why the chronic misunderstanding of therapy and mental health practices in general rather irks me. It is not self indulgent victim cosplay where we absolve ourselves of responsibility for the state of our lives. What kind of insanity would that be? Instead it is the intentional management of our mind and our thought processes. It is simply necessary maintenance for optimal health. You eat a decent diet, you try not to drink too much, you get good sleep, you stay close to your friends and family, and you consciously manage your mind. That’s some proper adulting. When I say “mind” I mean your thoughts, your ideas, your “mindset”, your perspective on yourself and the world. It’s what happens in your brain that impacts your experience. We are only consciously aware of a small percent of what’s happening in our brain. The vast majority of what we “think” throughout the day we are not consciously aware of and this creates an interesting challenge. That one weird thing your uncle said to you about relationships when you were 7 might have formed some sturdy neuropathways in your head… and still be there to this day without you being consciously aware of it! So let’s hope your uncle was a wise and loving man otherwise that old thought pattern might be causing you some trouble. You can think of your subconscious mind as the operating system that you are running. The issue is that updates don’t happen automatically. If you want to run a new and improved operating system, you have to painstakingly install a new one yourself. Sometimes one line of code at a time. There is an interesting thing about humans, we are born too early. Now this has to do with complex evolutionary things like humans learning to walk upright and the size of our hip bones and what’s optimal for walking vs what’s optimal for childbearing. Long story short, we are born too soon. Most babies in the animal kingdom emerge capable of independent mobility and communication. But humans, wow are we helpless babies. And for that first year of our life, our operating system is still being installed. Our nervous system is still forming. And this brings us to a very popular therapy trope… Tell me about your mother! That’s the cliche right? You walk into a therapist's office, lay down on the couch, and the first thing your therapist says is “tell me about your mother.” Then you describe in detail everything your mother has ever done wrong, your therapist absolves you of any responsibility for any of your errors and you both toast your success with some champagne! Right? Of course not. Questions about your early childhood, or your upbringing, and questions about your mother, or whoever raised you, are indeed very common. But here your therapist isn’t looking to find the person to blame, they are asking you, “what operating system are you running?” You see most of us get an operating system installed that is rather optimal for the environment that we were in during our early childhood. But decades later when we wind up on a therapist couch, or zoom meeting schedule, it’s almost certainly because that operating system is wildly outdated and no longer helping us. So it may very well be that you are having a problem with workplace anxiety and your therapist asks you about your mother. But of course none of this is about your mother, it’s about the operating system that your mother installed in your brain 40 years ago that desperately needs an update. This stuff is of course complex and I don’t want to do it a disservice by over simplifying it, but, I do think it’s fair to say a very big factor, and for a lot of people, the primary factor in depression and anxiety are damaging old subconscious thought patterns. Our perspective on life and ourselves, our “mindset”, our damaging old operating system. This is how “therapy” helps us improve ourselves. It is the work of determining what operating system you’re running, sorting out which parts of that are now holding you back and in need of an update, and going about updating that software. Unfortunately, most of us don’t wind up “in therapy” until something has gone very wrong in our life. Therapy is expensive, it’s time consuming, it’s difficult, and there is still some stigma around it. And so we don’t make that call until we are really suffering and desperate for a solution. And when we do finally make that call we generally have no idea what we are doing and have no idea what kind of help we need, and so we start with some good old fashioned talk therapy. Talk therapy might not be what you wind up needing, but it’s a great place to start to get an education. Comedian Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa has a great bit about going to therapy. He says he thought that a therapist would fix him like a mechanic fixes his car, but instead he found that therapy is much less like going to a mechanic and much more like Ikea for your emotions, “where you are given some tools and materials but you have to put your sh*tty table of a personality together all by yourself.” Because talk therapy is a great place to get an understanding of which operating system you are running and in which ways it’s erroring out, but you still have to do the work of updating that operating system. For some people their operating system isn’t in need of that many updates and just talking to a therapist and installing a few new insights and perspectives will be enough of a solution. But for many others, a full upgrade may be needed, perhaps even some database migrations, and that requires some serious upgrade tools! Thankfully there are many, many options these days. Deep journaling work like the Neurocycle process, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), psychedelic assisted therapy, and many more. While all of these have their own approach, they are all essentially tools for a serious operating system upgrade. And this upgrade is hard work! This isn’t about blaming grandpa, this is about re-wiring your mind, on a physical level, one neuropathway at a time. You keep an eye on your blood pressure, you step on the scale to check your weight, maybe you use a sleep tracker! And, if you are being a responsible adult, you monitor your mind. When your blood pressure is too high you call your doc and take some pills and change your diet. And when your anxiety starts to kick up, you call your therapist, maybe take some pills, and update your operating system. Therapy isn’t a pity party, it’s not about who to blame, it’s the conscious management of your mind. It’s hard work, and it’s proper adulting.

Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Pain plus non acceptance equals suffering.

Wait...I’ve got a new strategy! Tell me if I should actually try it! When I meet a dude that is setting off the red pill alarms instead of waiting for him to launch into a lecture... I’ll beat him to the punch! I’ll just uninvited, unexpectedly, launch into an epic mansplaining rant about the anthropologic study of humans and how patriarchy is just an unfortunate blip on our road map and the result of logistics after the agricultural revolution. I’ll dive into psychology and neuroscience lecturing on the gender differences in the development and activity levels of the prefrontal cortex and how women’s prefrontal development makes them great long term planners and decision makers. I’ll note the mating and child-rearing practices of “pre-history” humans as this represents 95% of our history and describes human’s “natural state”. I’ll explain the significance of lots of animal studies including the famously wildly inaccurate book on wolves from biologist L. David Mech in 1970, and of course the infamous "Forest Troop" Baboon case study showing how the health outcomes for a Baboon troop improved after the aggressive males died off from a tuberculosis outbreak. ...on and on. I’m a nerd with a big vocabulary, I can really filibuster someone in conversation. It’s an asshole move but I can do it. I can throw big words and fancy terms at someone until I exhaust them. ...what do ya think??? What might happen if I do it? 🤔 😁

What scares me the most isn't that some tragedy might come my way, it's that a tragedy might come my way and no one will believe me or help me. That's the part that causes the nightmares.

I am annoyed that we have a price crash but without the end of the Treasury company frenzy.